Casting About

For a long time now I seem to use this blog as a space to tap around in when I am not sure what I want to do. It's a kind of lost space, a space I'd describe with a word I can't find at the moment...liminal. There, I found it. That's why I come here, I suppose. To find things that aren't really anywhere.

It's a Friday night, it's been a tightly-wound week, and I'm not sure what I want to do. So here I am again.

I wonder what I'll find. I found liminal, which by nature is a weird thing to find since it is by definition an ever-shifting space that one doesn't find so much as find oneself in.

...even when I have to switch off I can't. Everything is an object for observation.

Some would, and have, called me a workaholic. That is, as Eddie Izzard would have me say, 'a load of Bol**cks'.

Last week someone told me with great conviction that he lived in a place that has long held strong positions on educational development, whereas I--he felt quite certain--do not.

How that incensed me!

Among educators of a certain ilk there seem to be 2 divergent paths: the one promises some kind of cozy environment of establishment, a place to rest on one's laurels for having been placed there; the other promises a great deal of challenge, much room for development, for maintainance, for improvement. You can't just place any old person in either path, rather there are some suited to one, some suited to the other. I prefer the path of challenge. Something to do with my time, energy, ideas. Places of change and flux. I don't like establishment. I like chaos.

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Liminal. That is an interesting new word for me. Not in my dictionary.

Sometimes, I come to a point where I have run with ethusiam, wonder and interest. Some form of consciousness slows me, I have come far from where I started, I look for atachment. I am still, where, which way, I search to run again.

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I cannot agree more with your description of educators - although I am high school and you are university...but the same is true even at the level I work to a certain extent - those of use who are flexible and open to change and evolve our thinking (as we ask of our students!) and those who are against anything but the drill and the worksheet. Urgh.

A bit of chaos and arguing methodology makes the day more interesting :)

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Amen. Although there is something to be said for incessant drilling, I've found--but good lord, how boring. I like to try all kinds of things...and drill. Especially because half my students are European, and come from an education tradition where they were drilled and drilled and they always know their basics better than the Americans...but the Americans are better trained in critical thinking. So I love having a mix, I want them to think...and parrot basics too. :)